Samsung Ace: the latest Galaxy smartphone gets official

Samsung's ever-expanding constellation of Galaxy stars has just had a new body officially added to its ranks – the Samsung Galaxy Ace. Or semi-officially, anyway.

The Galaxy Ace first crossed our satellites as the Samsung Galaxy S Mini a couple of weeks ago, then last week we got word its name had changed to the now-confirmed Ace moniker.

Now, just when we were nicely hunkered down expecting to hear nothing further until Mobile World Congress, along comes Samsung Indonesia to spoil the party and out the Galaxy Ace officially.

We're not sure if this is an intentional outing or not – we've certainly never heard of Sammy using its Indonesian arm for official product launches before – but either way, the horse has bolted and the news is out.

Now that we have the full specs in hand courtesy of a shiny new product page, it seems the Galaxy Ace – or the S5830, to use its model name (and not the S5570 as we originally thought) isn't quite the plucky little smartphone titch after all.

It boasts a 3.5in screen – not huge but certainly not tiny, or Mini either – with a middle-of-the-road 320 x 480 resolution. Round the back is a similarly acceptable 5-megapixel camera complete with LED flash.

The heavy lifting comes courtesy of an 800MHz processor, presumably of Samsung's own making though the specification doesn't say, while Android 2.2 Froyo does operating system duty.

All the rest of the moderate haul of bells and whistles can be viewed on the Galaxy Ace's product page, which is headlined “Become an Ace”. Just so you know.

Price and availability? You know the drill by now – we'll expect to find out at MWC next month.